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Saturday, 27 April 2013

New article on peer review in Nature Scientific Reports: "How important tasks are performed: peer review" by T. Hartonen and M.J. Alaya

Abstract

The advancement of various fields of science depends on the actions of
individual scientists via the peer review process. The referees' work patterns
and stochastic nature of decision making both relate to the particular features
of refereeing and to the universal aspects of human behavior. Here, we show that
the time a referee takes to write a report on a scientific manuscript depends on
the final verdict. The data is compared to a model, where the review takes place
in an ongoing competition of completing an important composite task with a large
number of concurrent ones - a Deadline -effect. In peer review human decision
making and task completion combine both long-range predictability and stochastic
variation due to a large degree of ever-changing external “friction”. http://www.nature.com/srep/2013/130417/srep01679/full/srep01679.html?WT.ec_id=SREP-20130423

Friday, 26 April 2013

The following COST action has been launched today, on developing new maps (or ways of navigating knowledge). It will be organising workshops, conferences, visits and funding costs of eligible participants to attend these. In particular it will fund some of the costs of people attending the Lorentz Workshop on "Simulating the Social Processes of Science", to be held 7-11 April 2013.

Anyone from any COST countries can apply to this network project to be funded to attend such, or even run such an event.

There is no escape from the expansion of information, so
that structuring and locating meaningful knowledge becomes ever more
difficult. This project will tackle this urgent problem using the unique
networking and capacity-building features provided by the COST
framework. For the first time, a platform will be created where
information professionals, sociologists, physicists, digital humanities
scholars and computer scientists collaborate on problems of data mining
and data curation in collections. The main objective is advancing the
analysis of large knowledge spaces and systems that organize and order
them. The combination of insights from complexity theory and knowledge
organization will improve our understanding of the collective,
self-organized nature of human knowledge production and will support the
development of new principles and methods of data representation,
processing, and archiving. To this end, the knowledge organization in
web-based information spaces such as Wikipedia as well as collections
from libraries, archives, and museums will be studied. KnowEscape aims
to create interactive knowledge maps. Their end users could be
scientists working between disciplines and seeking mutual understanding;
science policy makers designing funding frameworks; cultural heritage
institutions aiming at better access to their collections; and students
seeking a first orientation in academia.

Public agencies like the U.S. National Science Foundation (NSF) and the
National Institutes of Health (NIH) award tens of billions of dollars in annual
science funding. How can this money be distributed as efficiently as possible
to best promote scientific innovation and productivity? The present system
relies primarily on peer review of project proposals. In 2010 alone, NSF
convened more than 15,000 scientists to review 55,542 proposals. Although
considered the scientific gold standard, peer review requires significant
overhead costs, and may be subject to biases, inconsistencies, and oversights.
We investigate a class of funding models in which all participants receive an
equal portion of yearly funding, but are then required to anonymously donate a
fraction of their funding to peers. The funding thus flows from one participant
to the next, each acting as if he or she were a funding agency themselves. Here
we show through a simulation conducted over large-scale citation data (37M
articles, 770M citations) that such a distributed system for science may yield
funding patterns similar to existing NIH and NSF distributions, but may do so
at much lower overhead while exhibiting a range of other desirable features.
Self-correcting mechanisms in scientific peer evaluation can yield an efficient
and fair distribution of funding. The proposed model can be applied in many
situations in which top-down or bottom-up allocation of public resources is
either impractical or undesirable, e.g. public investments, distribution
chains, and shared resource management.

Coauthorship and citation in scientific publishing

A large number of published studies have examined the properties of either
networks of citation among scientific papers or networks of coauthorship among
scientists. Here, using an extensive data set covering more than a century of
physics papers published in the Physical Review, we study a hybrid
coauthorship/citation network that combines the two, which we analyze to gain
insight into the correlations and interactions between authorship and citation.
Among other things, we investigate the extent to which individuals tend to cite
themselves or their collaborators more than others, the extent to which they
cite themselves or their collaborators more quickly after publication, and the
extent to which they tend to return the favor of a citation from another
scientist.

Tuesday, 9 April 2013

has
been approved by NIAS and the Lorentz Center.
Congratulations! We have been able to schedule the workshop for the
period 7 – 11 April 2014at the venue Lorentz Center@Oort in Leiden in the Netherlands.

Abstract

This paper investigates the impact of referee behaviour on the quality
and efficiency of peer review. We focused on the importance of
reciprocity motives in ensuring cooperation between all involved
parties. We modelled peer review as a process based on knowledge
asymmetries and subject to evaluation bias. We built various simulation
scenarios in which we tested different interaction conditions and author
and referee behaviour. We found that reciprocity cannot always have per
se a positive effect on the quality of peer review, as it may tend to
increase evaluation bias. It can have a positive effect only when
reciprocity motives are inspired by disinterested standards of fairness

This is a blog (now) associated with the European Social Simulation Assocation SIG on "Simulating the Social Processes of Science". For all queries about the SIG, or items to post here please contact Bruce Edmonds "bruce at edmonds dot name". Thanks